It is very important
that your leadership
be invested in the
idea of collaboration
and understand the
benefits.”

work with organizations to understand
what it is they’re trying to achieve and
what is their ultimate business goal—
because there’s no point having a collaboration technology if you’re not
trying to achieve some sort of business
or organizational outcome.

Second, there’s a technology component. You need to integrate the social
collaboration tool into your existing
systems because this will remove friction for the user. You want to make
your systems as easy to use and engage
with as possible. Having to input an
extra login or go through some security process is a barrier to engagement
with the collaboration tool.

The third area is actually very critical—it’s around repositioning communications. If we want people to
change their behaviors, and we’ve
given them this wonderful tool to do
it, we need to educate them not necessarily on how to use the tool but about
why they should use it. What’s in it for
them? How is this going to help them
do their job?

CW: So what are the barriers to the
openness and the transparency, and
the barriers to the technology?

RD: We have very clear structures tohelp organizations deal with this. Ithink one is just the perception ofsocial tools. We’ve built Yammer fromthe ground up to be for business, butbecause it’s an enterprise social net-work, often people will mistake thatfor being like a consumer tool. Theythink, Oh, this is not for work. My kidsuse tools similar to this like Facebookand just waste time on it. What we aredoing is taking that style of communi-cation, which we know is very effec-tive, and moving it into the context ofbusiness. Another barrier is a lack ofexecutive buy-in or participation. It isvery important that your leadership beinvested in the idea of collaborationand understand the benefits. They alsoneed to participate. And by that I don’tmean that they should be on the socialcollaboration tool all the time andanswering questions, but they shouldbe a visible presence, meaning theyshould regularly post updates and beprepared to engage with employees viathe tool from time to time.

CW: What type of organizational culture is most receptive to collaboration?

RD: You have to go back in history a
little bit and look at why organizations are structured the way they are.
You have to go back to the Industrial
Revolution, because that’s when we
first learned to mass-produce products and services. We needed very
scalable, repeatable, predictable processes to do that. This required a very
big layer in the organization—
effectively, management—to manage that
process and the communications.
And that makes a lot of sense if you
are going to do the same thing for 10,
20, 30 years. But what that does is it
prioritizes efficiency over innovation.
Because you just want to be doing
something in the most efficient way
possible, and that’s not necessarily the
most innovative way. And it’s not necessarily very reflective of how organizations work now, but we’re still left
with that structure.

To be successful in collaboration,
you must outline what you want to
use this tool for and what you want
to accomplish. I ask clients who say
they haven’t been successful in implementing a collaboration tool the following questions:

• Was it clearly communicated that
this was an officially sanctioned tool?